Design tables

- [Instructor] In SolidWorks routing, design tables are what allow the configurations of our various design library parts to be created. They're very important, also, if you wish to create your own custom parts. To gain a better understanding of configurations and to learn more about importing our own data, let's take a look at the design tables of some of the standard design library parts. To start off, let's go into our design library in our routing section. And under piping, let's go into the elbows folder again. This time, instead of trying to insert one, we're actually going to take a better look at the individual part.

So I'm going to click on this one part. Right click and select Open. Now after that loads, you can see we have the pipe that we've been inserting into our designs. However, this one actually has a large number of configurations. And by going up to the configuration manager I'm going to click that. And now we can see all of the different configurations that we've been choosing from this whole time. Now, it's a pretty high number, and that's because we've been picking them from a design table that has a large amount of data inputted into it.

So if you want to see one of these other configurations while you're looking at this part, just go ahead and right click and select Show Configuration. You'll see that this one now has a green check mark next to it, as opposed to the other one we were looking at a second ago. Now, let's take a look at the tables that are influencing all of these different configurations. To do that, we're going to go up to this tables tab. Select drop down. And you'll see we have our design table option here. This is actually an Excel file, that's what this green X is standing for. So I'm going to right click on that and I'm going to save this table to our computer.

So I'm going to go ahead and directly save that into our exercise files folder. So if you want to reference it, you can do that. I'm just going to add the word Design Table to the end of this. And you will be able to exit from there, as well as in SoidWorks the same way that I got to it. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Save. And now, I'm going to go and open that file. So after opening it, you can see that there are a lot of names and numbers here. Over on the far column, you'll see these are the names of the configurations that we've been pulling from.

And each of these numbers represents a different dimension or feature that changes based on which configuration you're selecting. If you want a little help or guidance on where these numbers actually came from, scroll all the way down to the bottom and SolidWorks will have added in some comments onto the Excel file. That you can see, some of them are taken from various standards that are set. And some of them are set based on different lengths that they think you might need. For example, diameters, or lengths. Now, if you wanted to add your own configurations you can do that at the bottom with a different name with all the dimensions laid out there, as well.

So let's go back into SolidWorks now. And take a look at what happens if I go into the Edit Table function instead of the Save Table. So, if I select Edit Table it does open that Excel sheet in SolidWorks itself. I can make any changes I want here to numbers and then hit the green check mark and those will be saved. I'm not going to make any changes since this is a standard design library part. But if you were working with your own custom parts this would be the place to do that. Then, you can also select the right click and Edit Table in new window.

And this will look very similar to what would happen if you saved the file and opened it yourself. But, you're making any edits that you want, saving it, and then saving that back into SolidWorks. So I will X out here. And go back into our SolidWorks. So now that we can see where the configurations for the parts in our design library came from, and have a basic understanding of how custom parts could be created and added to our models, let's move onto explore some of the other features that we can add to our pipe routes.